New project to ‘deepen sustainability’

February 17, 2016

A new European Union-funded project has been launched to “deepen the roots of sustainability in agri-food systems by harnessing scientific and local knowledge, people’s energy, motivation and innovation skills around the theme of agro-biodiversity by making use of novel, improved and demand-driven ICT (information communications technology) solutions”.

Called CAPSELLA (Collective Awareness PlatformS for Environmentally-sound Land management based on data technoLogies and Agrobiodiversity), the project is funded under the Horizon 2020 programme and brings together eight research and industry partners.

The project reports: “CAPSELLA will focus on two complementary domains: agro-biodiversity and the food supply chain. It will use participatory bottom-up data collection and top-down data integration to develop solutions for these domains. The project will build from scratch open data repositories concerning regional agro-biodiversity, and will build upon and enhance existing data sets on the agro-biodiversity and food domains. Based on these, the project will develop a number of community-driven data powered ICT solutions, which will be tested by the communities engaged in the project and will result in a number of pilots.”

At the centre of its work will be three multidisciplinary, community-driven use cases:

A ‘field scenario’ addressing the use of functional agro-biodiversity in cropping systems

A ‘food scenario’ addressing the transparency of the food chain in the processes related to the production, distribution and consumption of food.

CAPSELLA’s first open workshop will be held in Volterra, Italy on May 30 and 31 this year, bringing together agro-biodiversity stakeholders (farmers, communities and networks) in order to understand and collect their requirements and needs, to encourage them to provide open data and to share knowledge and to raise awareness about CAPSELLA’s goals and results such as the delivery of innovative ICT solutions to match communities’ needs.